Sandra Kimokoti played basketball at her high school in Nairobi, Kenya,
and when she arrived at Brown she looked for a recreational league to
keep her skills up. When she couldn’t find one, she took up rugby
instead. It not only became an enduring passion, it became a vehicle
for her social activism. In the summer of her junior year, she used
rugby to teach Kenyan girls sex education.

Dana Smith

Sandra Kimokoti '15.

Though
Kimokoti spent most of her youth in Kenya, her last two years of high
school were in South Africa at the African Leadership Academy, a
prestigious private school in Johannesburg that draws students from
across the continent. The school placed a special emphasis on pairing
learning with community engagement. If she’d returned to Kenya for
college, she knew she would have had to choose a profession or
specialty right away. She wanted a broader education than that. When
she went online and typed in her criteria—a flexible curriculum, the
opportunity to take classes in diverse subjects—Brown popped right
up.

Kimokoti wasn’t allowed to play rugby in Kenya. The principal of her
school didn’t believe it was an appropriate sport for girls. At Brown
she fell in love with it. “I just love to hit," she says. She also
found it helped her overcome the social barriers between herself and
her American classmates. "It's such a hodgepodge of people who come
together and play," she says. "Nobody cares where you're from as long
as you can hit someone and you're fast. You need strength and speed,
and that's all that matters."

Kimokoti organized her trip to Kenya to teach rugby through a Royce
Fellowship. She chose the area of western Kenya where her mother grew
up, and settled on the town of Kitale, just east of the Ugandan border.
Within days after her arrival, Kimokoti had the Nyabomo Secondary
School’s rugby team up and running. In between grueling practice
sessions, she led discussions with the girls about AIDS, teenage
pregnancy, sexual violence, balancing school with housework, and
setting personal goals.

Kitale is a farming town where homosexuality is a taboo topic. If HIV
is discussed at all, it’s done in private. Kimokoti was careful not to
break any of these social norms. "You can't take what's important at
Brown,” she says, “and force it on a community where these things are
not talked about."

Still, the conversations were rich and went well beyond the
abstinence-only curricula taught in many Kenyan schools. Because women
are so often banned from playing rugby, the girls were already running
against the social norms. "You take down physical barriers, Kimokoti
says, “then the mental barriers begin to fall, too."

Although Kimokoti was a biology concentrator, she wants to pursue a
career in business. For now she’s working for a Kenyan consulting
company, but she plans eventually to return to the United States to
attend business school.

As for rugby, she says, "Hopefully, I will find a way to keep playing."

More profiles from the class of 2015:

After
her family lost everything to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, G. Maris Jones ’15 reconsidered her dream of going to Brown.

Seventy-eight
percent of African malaria victims are children under the age of
five. Nicholas Hilton ’15 wants to change that.

Clyde Lawrence ’15 wrote music for Miss Congeniality
at age 6. He's also written for Hugh Grant
and jammed with Steven Tyler.

Linh Tran ’15
spent two years helping fruit growers in her native Vietnam. She hopes you'll soon be drinking
their fruit juice.

Research by Hannah Begley ’15 suggests
juries may be quicker to convict on weak evidence for certain pornography charges.

A single dad and a U.S. Navy veteran of nuclear submarines, Matthew Ricci ’15 is not your typical Brown student.

Comments (1)

09/03/15

Hongera, Sandra! You are living the expression of the rugby players' mantra "Rugby is Life!" Sport teaches us about life - winning, losing, team work, goal-setting, commitment, strategy... You're showing how it can go beyond, to be used as a vehicle for inclusion and diversity. Look forward to seeing you line up for the Kenya Lionesses.

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